Europe

A music and dance performance in Copenhagen included live feeds of musicians in London and dancers in Barcelona. Thanks to LOLA technology the synchronised effect was as if they were all physically present on the same stage.

On 19 April 2017 the 'Rock' asteroid made an uncomfortably close pass to Earth - the closest in 400 years. The first step to protecting against such hazards is to monitor them to calculate their precise orbits; this requires fast, reliable internet connections so that the huge volumes of observation data involved can be sent speedily and reliably to researchers around the world for analysis.

Although approx. 2555 km apart, theatre students from The University of Tampere, Finland, and Coventry University, UK, are rehearsing Shakespeare together, sharing a “virtual learning theatre” made possible by powerful videoconferencing equipment and high-speed connectivity.

As weather forecasts are becoming increasingly detailed, data volumes are increasing as well, demanding high-speed connectivity and supercomputing power.

Developing alternative, greener energy sources is a key priority across the world but many countries don’t have the infrastructure and skills needed to create renewable energy industries from scratch. Technology, and in particular research networks, can help develop these skills, transferring knowledge to build the industry.

ARES (Advanced networking for the EU genomic Research) is implementing novel genome content distribution solutions to make large data sets accessible to healthcare practitioners for better patient care. Robust and bottleneck-free data networks are key to the success of this vital undertaking.

Eske Willerslev, one of the world’s leading experts in ancient DNA, DNA degradation, and evolutionary biology, is using powerful DNA sequencing technology to reveal fundamentally new insights, reconstructing the past 50.000 years of human history.

The University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and SURF are collaborating on a campus network infrastructure optimized for sending research data. The aim is to create a blueprint for an architecture to help researchers collaborate on data-intensive research. The first use case is focusing on crop genome data.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) near Cambridge, UK, distributes datasets worldwide using R&E connectivity. This biological data enables the discovery of new drugs, new diagnostics and increasingly new agro-chemicals. The Institute's work, which includes the 1000 Genomes Project, has generated petabytes of data and this growth is showing no signs of abating.

A dedicated line between two supercomputers in Denmark allows biomedical researchers to share data faster and easier than before, helping them carry out their research into the relationship between genetics and psychiatric illnesses.

Slovenian researchers analysed various aspects of the biology of extremophilic fungi, which can act as pathogens that are harmful to humans and used the same methods in their winning solution in data mining for the European Space Agency.

Something the general public is unaware of is that several Swiss research groups were instrumental in proving the existence of the Higgs boson, and all of them rely on SWITCHlan to transfer data.